Rose Lemberg has announced the table of contents for An Alphabet of Embers, and I'm thrilled and humbled all over again that I get to be a part of this anthology. It's an amazing lineup of writers -- and so many fellow first-timers!
When I saw the project on Kickstarter and eventually decided to submit, I realized I had entered the dangerous "smitten" zone of hoped-for publication. By the time I was done revising (and revising and revising) my piece to submit, the little deer of hope in my gut was prancing around and shouting, "This has to be the place! I don't want any other home but this one for this story!"

It was my first fiction submission, after devoting the past 10+ years to poetry. Over the last year, thanks in large part to a magical realism class at The Grotto in San Francisco, I've been exploring my fantasy brain and fiction muscles. It started as a kind of cross-training to keep my poetry on its toes, but now fiction is where I'm spending more and more time. The result is that I tend to straddle that murky space between poetry and fiction... I love how the two can blend, and I'm working to understand plot and character development without losing the nebulous, image-driven heart of poetry.

So An Alphabet of Embers spoke to me right away as a project that lives in that space. If I could have picked any place to make my first fiction sale, especially in the SFF community, this was the one. And now seeing the full table of contents, I'm ecstatic that my story will get to meet the world alongside such an array of voices... the titles alone read together like a dreamy poem. I can't wait to read the anthology this spring!